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Notes -
A Tone-Shift in the Ukraine War
Lately, I've noticed that the tone of the discussion regarding Ukraine both on the Motte and on X has changed considerably. Notably, it seems that people are taking a much more pessimistic view of Ukraine's chances. The default assumption now is that Ukraine will lose the war.
I think a stalemate is still quite possible, but the more optimistic assumptions that Ukraine would regain lost territory (or comically, Crimea) are now a dead letter. So what, exactly, are our leaders thinking? Recently, Macron went off-narrative a bit, suggesting that France could send troops into Ukraine. More ominously, Secretary of State Blinken said that Ukraine will join NATO.
Perhaps Western leaders view this sabre-rattling as good for their electoral chances. And, until recently, the war was seen as a relatively cost-effective way to weaken Russia. (Sadly, this seems to have failed as Russia has freely exported oil to India and China and is making armaments in great numbers).
But what of Ukrainians themselves? Will they tire of being NATO's cat's paw? It's impossible to find good numbers on how many Ukrainian men have been killed so far in this war. It's likely in the hundreds of thousands. Towns and villages throughout the country are devoid of men, as the men (hunted by conscription) either flee, hide, or are sent to the fronts.
User @Sloot shared this nuclear-grade propoganda. While Ukrainian men fight and die in some trench, an increasing number of Ukrainian women are finding new homes (and Tinder dates) in Germany. Concern about female fidelity has always been a prominent feature of wartime propaganda. But, this takes it to a new level, since the women are in a different country, making new, better lives for themselves. How many will ever even return to Ukraine?
Ukrainian men are getting a raw deal in an effort to reconquer lost territory, whose residents probably want to be part of Russia anyway. Why should Ukrainians fight and die for some abstract geopolitical goal of NATO?
The ‘facts’ here seem obvious, and don’t necessarily favor either side’s story:
The ‘West’ is bleeding Russia for cheap and with no military or civilian casualties, but military experience is useful for an army and the Russian conscripts are largely Central Asian peasants, not higher IQ Muscovites and Peterburgians whose loss would actually damage Russia’s long term prospects. On the other hand, many high IQ Russians in tech and other industries have fled, there has been a brain drain (which was already happening before the war and has now accelerated). Russia has no good long term prospects. The birth rate is shit, demographically the Muslims from Central Asia are ascendant, the culture certainly isn’t ’based and trad’, and were still talking about a relatively poor country (certainly by Western standards) on every indicator.
Russia’s industrial capacity has improved, and as someone here said last week re. Wirecard, if desperation even slightly reduces Russian corruption, that’s a very bad thing for the West in the long term since elite Russians are very competent when not hamstrung by their own corrupt tendencies. On the other hand, Russia’s defense export business has declined while that of core Western provinces like France and South Korea has increased, which is good for the West both economically and in terms of building up production capacity for future conflict.
While the lack of munitions production capacity in the US, UK and much of Western Europe has been noted, it is slowly starting to be rectified. Consider the counterfactual where we don’t ‘realize’ this until we’re about to fight China. 10 or 15 years from now the Ukraine war will have led to a major increase in Western defense production capacity, which is more useful against the primary threat. Better to find out the stores are empty in a largely irrelevant little post-Soviet proxy conflict with Putin than in the big war everyone knows could be coming.
While fighting this war is genuinely disastrous for the Ukrainian people for the many reasons raised in this thread, they seem to want to do it. This can’t merely be dismissed or ignored, there seems to be a genuinely popular will to resist the Russians. The West predicted Kiev would fall in 3 days, literally pulling out embassy staff temporarily so they didn’t accidentally die and cause a diplomatic incident with Russia as new landlord. The Ukrainian army didn’t collapse. Therefore game theoretic reasons why they’re retarded are manifestly subjugated to romantic or other desires for nationalism (a useful lesson in any case).
My opinion? Thy shall know them by their fruits. Russia is a shithole that most intelligent and wealthy people are fleeing, at least in part. It simply isn’t a good place to live, it has no glorious civilizational trajectory, and it’s an afterthought in the broader geopolitical conflict with China. Ukraine is a failed country with a sublevel tier GDP (one of the worst IQ to GDP/capita ratios in the entire world) that has no future. But, they want to fight and to die, so I don’t think giving them some old munitions is really disastrous for the West.
Russian aggression has a lot to do with why Ukraine's economy is doing so badly, I should think.
Ukraine was also poor before war.
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